While this is an interesting contributory factor, the kind of feedback people get regarding pricing is epic. I have a friend who released an app for customer relationship management ("FollowUp!", or something like that; it could also be used to keep track of friends you don't talk to often enough) and got a comment that read along the lines of:

"""This app is amazing. It changes the way I do business. I use it every single day. It exactly solves my problem. However, $5 for an app? Come on, that is unreasonable."""

Additionally, there are good ways to mitigate people purchasing things "blind": in addition to having good screenshots, and a well written description (preferably one you redraft often and are A/B testing), you are also going to want a website that includes more: maybe a video.

I mean, a ton of video games are also "crap": I remember many Nintendo games I used to own that simply sucked, and where you regret having spent $35 on the cartridge. However, people still paid $35 for those cartridges, as the good games spent the time to do marketing.

At the time that meant getting into trade magazines (Nintendo Power! being an epic one, but there were tons of smaller ones that I used to subscribe to); today that would mean being covered by various blogs or online papers. A few years ago, we had a game company, and one of our three people spent most of his time just handling press.

This is no different for iPhone games either: the guy who wrote GeoDefense (one of the most popular and most profitable games for the iPhone platform) talks endlessly at conferences about how what made him successful was hiring a PR firm to handle his press announcements: he was simply covered everywhere.

With things like this in place, users aren't "buying blind": they are making informed decisions about products they heard about elsewhere, and are simply using the App Store as a payment and distribution vehicle.

(Which, seriously, is all that it is good at; too many people try to use it for "discoverability", and then end up with these very problems: users don't really know what their app is or what it does, no one finds it unless you are under top-selling, and before you know it you are stuck in a $1 price category or trying to work freemium; they are bargain-binning themselves.)

I think a trial is a good idea.

Though screenshots seem to be fair warning against lousy apps. For instance, a lot of lousy apps "waste" 2 or 3 of their screenshots with obscure details or marketing slides because (I assume) they don't really have much in the app itself to show off. Any time I've seen 5 full-screen, detailed, unique, functional screen shots I haven't really been disappointed; a quality app doesn't have any trouble looking that way.

I think developers probably have a little too much leeway over what they can change (since you can't really "go back" once you "upgrade"). For instance, I've seen games change fairly substantially compared to their original versions a year ago, and sometimes it's for the worse.